Page 3

Chapter 3

Avery

T he clanging pulled Avery out of a deep sleep. But even as a child, she had always woken quickly. It was a valuable skill on the road.

It still took her a moment to scramble out of her bedroll, though, and by the time she had, both the intruder and Nutmeg were gone. She glanced at the cart, noting the opened crate before she sprinted after her horse.

She hadn’t gone far when she raced between two trees and nearly collided with the mare. Nutmeg had managed to catch the thief much more quickly than she’d expected. She patted the horse’s neck approvingly as she moved forward to get a good look at the man on the ground.

She expected to find an angry, aggressive thief looking up at her, but instead the young man on the ground was staring at the three-branched candlestick in his hands, his expression shocked. Avery’s eyes narrowed as she tried to make sense of the situation. Who was he?

The man finally looked up, meeting her eyes, and she blinked in surprise. “It’s you.”

The disappointment spearing through her was irrational. She had no reason to be disappointed that the blue-eyed young man from Henton was nothing more than a common thief. He must have been scoping his next target and decided she was an easier mark than the smith. Surely it wasn’t disappointment in him but in her own failure to recognize his intent. She wasn’t usually so obtuse.

“You’re a thief,” she said, her words tinged with disgust. If there was one thing merchants disliked, it was thieves.

He stared up at her, apparently shocked into silence. She expected him to make another attempt to bolt, but he remained seated on the ground. As the moment drew out, her brows furrowed.

If he was a thief, he was a bad one. He’d only stolen a single item, and probably the least valuable one in the crate. Did he know something about the candelabra she didn’t?

Avery wanted to interrogate him, but his appearance stayed her tongue. If he’d looked like a recovering invalid the last time she’d seen him, he looked like an active one now. His face was dangerously pale in the moonlight, and she suddenly had the feeling he was still sitting because standing was too difficult a task.

She had to suppress an instinct to ask if he was all right and to offer help. Effective thief or not, he had still stolen from her. She had not been the one to make them enemies.

“Does that candlestick have some marvelous property of which I’m unaware?” she drawled, affecting nonchalance.

He looked down at the brass object and then back up at her, surprising her with a rueful laugh.

“Not to my knowledge, no. It appears to be a perfectly ordinary brass candlestick.”

She met his eyes, reminding herself that the piercing intensity of their color told her nothing about his character. Even when he smiled at her, heightening the effect of his eyes, she refused to be moved.

“I’m Elliot, by the way,” he added.

“Out of all the items in my cart, you made an interesting selection,” she said, ignoring his attempted introduction.

He sighed. “I’m in desperate need of a candelabra.”

Desperate. It was the word that had come to mind when she had first seen his expression. But the words made no sense. If it wasn’t the middle of the night, she would have suspected him of being sun-addled.

Elliot put a hand to his head, as if attempting to push back a splitting headache. Avery sighed. He might be a petty thief, but she didn’t have it in her to come down hard on someone who looked like he might collapse at any moment.

“If you need one so desperately, you can have it,” she said. “It didn’t cost me much, anyway.”

He shook his head, as if attempting to clear it. “Money isn’t an object. I can afford to pay…” His voice trailed off as his look of pain intensified.

Avery frowned down at him, her instinctive sympathy still battling with her indignation. “If money isn’t an issue, why did you steal it?”

“I…didn’t…steal…it,” he rasped out, his eyes tightly closed.

Avery’s eyes widened. He really must be addled. Maybe it was the pain. How could he sit there with her candelabra in his hand and claim he hadn’t stolen it?

But if he was addled with pain, there was no point arguing with him.

“All right, then,” she said. “You’ve got your candlestick now, and we can even say you didn’t steal it, if that makes you feel better. Just don’t come near me or my cart again.”

“I don’t…want it.” Elliot pushed the candelabra along the ground toward her, the words sounding forced out of him.

Avery gaped at him. Maybe she hadn’t woken up at all, and the whole encounter was a dream. A flush crept up her face as she remembered that the blue-eyed man had made a brief appearance in one of her dreams the night before as well.

The people and experiences of the day often wove themselves into her dreams—all in fantastical and nonsensical ways, of course—but she didn’t usually dream repeatedly of someone she’d only seen briefly in passing.

She leaned over and picked up the candelabra, still flushing. If she was in a dream, it was time to wake up.

“Do you have…any…others?” Elliot gasped out.

“Other candelabras?” She shook her head as the conversation descended further into farce. “You want me to let you steal a better one now?”

“Not…steal,” he rasped out his protest again.

Avery remembered her determination not to argue with him. “It doesn’t matter because I don’t have any others,” she said. “I only purchased this one on a whim because it was cheap. I usually focus on more unusual items. I can’t carry too much weight in my cart, so I have to choose my wares carefully.”

She stopped herself. She didn’t need to explain her business model to the thief any more than she needed to argue with him.

“If you don’t want this one, fine.” She picked it up, brushing off the dirt. “Just remember what I said about staying away from me in future. I won’t be so understanding next time. If I so much as see you in the same town…” She gave him a stern look. “If you hear the merchant Avery is visiting a village you’re in, turn right around and head back out again.”

“Wait—” Elliot made as if to lunge in her direction and toppled over instead.

She hesitated, looking down at him with another well of sympathy.

“Are you sure?” he whispered. “You don’t have any others? Not even one? You must have one more somewhere.”

Avery closed her eyes and breathed slowly. If she was in a dream, shouldn’t she have woken up by now?

“I’m sorry,” she said firmly, “but I don’t have any others. I know every item in my cart.”

She turned to go, one hand in Nutmeg’s mane. But as she walked away, her conscience gave a pang. She stopped, glancing back to see Elliot struggling back to a sitting position. What if it wasn’t a dream?

“Are you going to be all right?” she asked reluctantly. “You don’t look well.”

Elliot’s shoulders slumped. “If you really don’t have the candelabra I need, you can’t help me.”

Avery frowned, but after another moment’s hesitation, she turned away again. She wasn’t a healer, and she had already done more than obligation demanded. Besides, she was still half-convinced she was going to wake up in her bedroll at any moment.

But as she walked back through the trees with Nutmeg, she didn’t wake. And when she reached the rest stop and her cart, she had to acknowledge that it didn’t seem to be a dream.

She looked back through the trees. Should she go back and find Elliot? Would he still be sitting where she had left him?

But before she did anything, she needed to pack up the mess he had made. The candelabra had been at the bottom of the crate, and he had managed to scatter a number of the other items in his haste to pull it out. As she placed each item safely back in the straw, her ire rose. He had been the one to invade her camp and steal from her. How did she know his sudden illness wasn’t feigned? It had come on conveniently quickly. Maybe it was an act he pulled to escape the consequences of his thievery.

She put the candelabra in last, closing the crate and lashing the canvas back down over everything. The whole situation was odd, but that was only more reason to stay out of it. When she had told her aunt and uncle that she meant to continue traveling alone, they had warned her against getting involved in anything too big.

“Don’t forget you’re on your own now, Avery,” her uncle had told her.

“Nutmeg will watch my back,” she’d told him with youthful confidence, and the mare had proved herself a faithful companion several times over. But there was still wisdom in her uncle’s words.

Whatever was going on with Elliot, Avery couldn’t be the one to fix it. Ignoring her instinct to go back for him, she climbed into her bedroll and tried to settle for the remainder of the night.

But despite her resolution not to get involved, when she left camp the next morning, she couldn’t help taking a path through the trees that led her past the place where she had left him. Her mind lightened when she saw no sign of a collapsed body. He must not have been as ill as he looked.

Now she just needed to forget the strange young man and his obsession with candelabras.